ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

(sorry if this isn't quite the proper place for this)

My personal 1.7cromancer thoughts after playing a run up to the Master:

-Levelling Night Sphere is entirely irrelevant due to the damage and duration increase both being rendered moot by Erupting Shadows, which increases the damage by much much more and with a single point allows you to easily prolong the duration of a bane indefinitely as the damage burst itself procs the duration boost, meaning you need only inflict at least 1 dark proc every 2 turns which necro should have absolutely no trouble doing (Spikes of Decrepitude in particular makes it entirely automatic although that does require that you eschew infusions)
-On that note I managed to get a 31-turn confusion on Rantha with little effort
-Runeskin should probably use 0.1f for its crit chance display as a single truncated digit really isn't telling me much at all
-Ghouls actually summon much more slowly than skellies at low level (1/29 turns for TL1 ghoul vs. 1/14 turns for TL1 skellies)
-River of Tortured Souls being made a sustain so you can cancel it easily is clever. I like it.
-My Armored Skellies keep disarming me w/ Acid Wave which is Bad Bad Bad
-Ghouls feel quite nice by contrast, give some nice utility and the splodey spells deal nice damage. They guzzle souls tho (kind of odd since aren't they supposed to be weak but disposable?)
-The graphic for Putrescent Liquefaction does not appear to actually change size accordingly with its radius
-Damage feels kind of high esp. due to how many strong DoTs you can stack (River of Souls in particular is insane, burn 1 soul per turn for a very very strong AoE blast per turn for 5 turns???) although defensively it's kind of bad, with little defense outside of Hiemal Shield. If an enemy lasted long enough against my DPS to take down my shield things felt very very risky.
- On that note, the teleport being borked was a huge downer and made the class feel much more vulnerable than it otherwise would have.
- Across the Veil works quite well for saving me when I'm in trouble -- the huge damage spike alone often ended fights that I otherwise wasn't sure I could win
-The new Invoke Darkness is very good -- hits a huge area, good damage, low cost, low cooldown. I love the widebeam and want to see it used more but I'm not sure if this is the most appropriate place for it -- I often felt like I barely needed any of the class's other AoEs when what should be a basic BnB spell eclipsed (hue) them all.
-Spikes of Decreptitude easily reveals stealthed targets (not really a problem per se as casters just generally rofl at stealth as a whole but it is funny)
- Call of the Mausoleum checks your Necrotic Aura (externally renamed Aura of Undeath) radius to determine its summon radius. It does not tell you this, and instead simply displays a radius of zero if you do not have Aura of Undeath active.
- Even with both Dire Plague and End of All Hope maxed out, the actual chance of the interaction occurring is very low -- only about 58% per instance of the effect triggering off of a given enemy given DP running through its entire base duration. I get that it's supposed to be more for crowds but necro already hardly has trouble dealing with swarms of weak enemies (just Invoke Darkness alone is a 10/10 trash delete button), and has much bigger problems dealing with swarms of strong enemies than simply needing to hit them a bit harder, and even in the case where you do have a lot of enemies I don't think a 58% chance per enemy for the interaction to occur is even worthwhile unless you're literally swamped.
- This also makes it rather useless for harvesting souls from enemies in battle
- I had huge issues doing Celia's tomb as I couldn't actually regain souls very effectively against the coffin bosses despite Soul Leech
- Neverending Unlife's rez condition seems significantly less useful on sub-Intense diffs as you will almost never be able to even find let alone kill an applicable creature in time to save yourself (although granted by the time you go lich only bosses will really be able to threaten you anyways)
- Also trying to self-kill for lichform is actual AIDS
- The lichform ceremony doesn't seem to actually consume energy? It just requires it
- Black Ice feels like it should be the first in its tree yet it is the second (low cooldown middling damage single-target spell vs. high damage AoE)
- Impending Doom is the only thing in Necro's entire kit that does Arcane damage.

I'd say the class is pretty strong. I wasn't in trouble very often while playing, and the Master in particular went down extremely easily. Things that did give me trouble and why:
- a Temporal Stalker chest boss that rolled Mindslayer and Cursed (just could not weather the damage it was putting out, and with Ghost Walk busted I couldn't get away; I got killed twice and in the end just console'd it away)
- Urkis (lightning pinging off of my ghouls lol -- still lived but it was dicey)
- Coffin bosses in LHC (not really hard per se but I couldn't really keep my souls topped up effectively against them which made things Quite Tedious)
- Celia (my own stupidity, I forgot I had eggsac and couldn't actually see her through my reduced lite radius so I wasted several turns just trying to find her while she blasted me)

I kind of regretted putting a cat point in Age of Dusk because I feel that it didn't actually offer much I wanted in the end -- just good-but-not-spectacular darkness AoE on a class that already has a stellar bar set for that, a synergy passive that was functionally useless, and some saves and a resistance to an admittedly very irritating status effect. I eschewed using Ghost Walk as it doesn't work properly and did not use River of Souls past a certain point as it seems very overpowered in its current state. My build was kind of messy; I was sort of going for a Darkness build based around Nightfall but I don't think I really got it to come together very coherently. I didn't really touch the bones, dread, chill, waste, or death trees much. I'll probably do more runs with the trees I didn't use (although I don't intend to touch Bones until the minions stop constantly disabling me).

I really like the class's basic concept, although the issues listed above and it overall feeling a bit overpowered drag it down a bit. I can see myself playing it a lot more esp. when it's more polished.

I think Across the Veil might need a cooldown of some sort because it seems to me that you can easily just heal yourself above the threshold over and over with totems, infusions, etc. for insane damage.

Nice points. I didn't use that combo with Erupting Shadows and, curiously enough, I got huge benefit out of Age of Dusk and found the class more defensively-oriented than offensive (and I didn't bother with Hiemal Shield at all), though you clearly illustrate that we took different paths so that makes sense. I used a much less soul-consuming-intensive build and never bothered with River of Souls and similar.

Either way, I do think it's overpowered on normal but I think that's common in Beta so I'm sure it'll be toned down.

As for Across the Veil, I would object to a cooldown and would prefer instead that the damage just be reduced, as the cooldown reduction is so useful, at least the way I ran it. I'm at the very end-game and am without a death yet, except the forced one to become a Lich.

I used a much less soul-consuming-intensive build and never bothered with River of Souls and similar. Interesting that we ended up with such different interpretations.

It's easy to kill yourself in one of the towns by drowning. Other than that, good write up.

Just a dood wrote:It's easy to kill yourself in one of the towns by drowning. Other than that, good write up.

(SCREAMS IN RAGE) WHY DIDNT I THINK OF THAT AAAAAAAAA

(For context, I am playing on Nightmare)

Lol, I just went and repeatedly melee'd the nearest randboss (in this case, the Farportal spawn) for my Lichform death. Took about 5 turns.

I have a particular question about Hiemal Shield - notably in that it's a sustained shield that gives extra bonuses when below 1 life. Does the reduction in crit damage apply even while the shield is down (but still sustained?) I have to imagine it does, but I'm having difficulty testing. If it doesn't, then there's a problem, because you'll never go under 1 health while the shield is active - on account of it being a shield.

Discarded Refuse unsustaining when you have no more ghouls is annoying. I always run out of ghouls while autoexploring and then have to burn a turn reactivating DR on the next combat. Not a huge problem, but I'd much prefer it to stay sustained and just not do anything when you have no ghouls out. A much larger problem is having DR consume your last remaining ghoul and then go on a 40 turn CD in the middle of combat.

My level 35 Lich Necromancer with 5/5 Assemble currently creates an Eternal Bone Giant with a max HP of..... a whopping 816. My necro himself has almost that much positive HP (719, currently) with another 600 in negative that the bone giant doesn't even get. Bone Armor helps - some - but I'm usually still finding myself having to rebuild my bone giant very, very often after every couple of combats. This seems a little underpowered to me. I'd want to almost double the Bone Giant's health scaling or let it inherit the player's die_at. Its damage is in a good place right now but it seems to be made out of tissue paper even at max investment. Hell, my regular ass skeletons and ghouls have HP in the 6-700's. Of course, they don't get the 66% all-res that the bone giant does but even that doesn't seem to do that much to preserve it. I expect it'll be a bit more durable once I hit endgame, but I'm not holding my breath as I can't put any more points into the skill and I barely saw it scale up any when I WAS adding points to it.

Everybody knows Spectre is busted right now, won't go into that.

If an enemy lasted long enough against my DPS to take down my shield things felt very very risky.

I sidestepped this easily by accidentally finding a Rune of Reflection, healing totems, and heavily (ab)using Across The Veil. I didn't actually even pick up Hiemal Shield until probably level 30. The shield is all pure bonus, you don't even need it. You actually want things to hit you below 1 life because you get loads of bonuses from it and you have the die_at to take it. Basically I wouldn't even pay attention to combat until an enemy hit me into the negatives. When they do, I pop Reflection and let Vitality (from an escort) pull me back up across the threshold. That's two hits of Across The Veil in very quick succession as long as you didn't get chunked too hard into the negatives. If you did, healing totem, same effect. All you have to do is get positive again, it barely even matters by how much. Enemy hits you again, bam, back into negatives, and bam, they get rocked by another Across The Veil. Consume Soul to reset yourself back to full health, trigger ATV AGAIN, and start the whole song and dance again.

My standard combat rotation goes as follows:
A wild enemy appears!
Chill of the Tomb, Invoke Darkness. Since Chill has a slow fire speed this usually makes them stack and both hit on the same turn, instantly killing most common enemies.
If still alive, Black Ice - at this point my minions should be on top of them.
Summon more minions if any have fallen. Follow up with Corpse Explosion. Reset sequence.
At any time during this sequence it can be interrupted for healing or for summoning without that much consequence.

I have so far completely ignored the entire Death tree - not because it isn't good, the first three skills all seem incredibly powerful - but because there are just so many damn places you have to put points. I'm actively trying to specialize into minion summoning and I still only have 4/1/5/2 in skeles and 4/1/2/0 in ghouls (ended up floating that point out of Discarded Refuse for now cause I hated it so much). Dreadmaster is 1/1/1/1 and DESPERATELY needs more points but I can't spare them because I've also been needing to fill out Animus for soul economy, Grave for damage (I 4/5'd Invoke Darkness for the wide beam and have so far ignored the rest of the Nightfall tree in favor of 4/5 Black Ice) and now, Master Necromancer so that my bone giant can last more than a couple of turns.

On the subject of Dreadmasters, they don't actually learn dispel magic like their description states.

Mr Frog wrote:

Just a dood wrote:It's easy to kill yourself in one of the towns by drowning. Other than that, good write up.

(SCREAMS IN RAGE) WHY DIDNT I THINK OF THAT AAAAAAAAA

Ditto.

The issue with the Discarded Refuse sustain, in my opinion, makes the skill useless for now. I went with Ghouls over skeletons and never bothered to put any points into it once I figured out how it worked. That'll definitely need some rethinking.

Lonewolf's strategy of taking damage, throwing up a damage shield, and letting Vitality or some other healing mechanic trigger Across the Veil, is the same strategy I used and it was VERY effective. I generally opened with Dire Plague and Torture Souls against mobs and then whatever survived, I hit with anything that would cause a status effect and then used Rigor Mortis and very few things required more. The cooldown from Across the Veil usually reset a key skill and so I was able to repeat this process fairly reliably even against tough bosses (the master went down in a hurry, as did the backup guardians). Once Eternal Night was active, which was the last category I got, then my healing problems went away almost entirely. I never got any cooldown reduction gear but had I, this entire process would have gone even more smoothly than it did.

The 2 turns of invincibility from Golden Age seems to work and then seemingly stopped working but while it worked, it mitigated the risk of being in negative life and made it much easier to stay close enough to zero that you could bounce back and forth "across the veil" fairly easily.

I really wanted to use Dreads but ultimately couldn't justify the investment beyond 1/1/1/1 and so I just skipped it. I can't really see any build that would heavily rely on the Dread, which is unfortunate, because the other options are too good.

One thing that's fun is what I think of as 'Ghoul Soup build'. Putrescent Liquifaction hurts your allies, and any allies hurt will have Soul Leech applied to them so when they die you gain a soul. This means that with enough points in the first two skills in the ghoul summoning tree, you actually end up going positive on souls because despite needing to sac some ghouls initially, you gobble up all the ghouls you paid souls to summon as well as the auto-summoned ghouls and ghoulkings which didn't cost any souls. If you summon ghouls on cooldown you can keep it running basically forever. The third talent that makes ghouls pop on taking damage works nicely with this too to make sure they die quickly enough to keep the duration going.

It's a good-sized point investment but the damage isn't bad and it works as a soul engine to power whatever other silly things you want to do.